It’s very sad and it happens every day. Children are abandoned, they pass away from sickness or other reasons, and nobody is there to claim their bodies. Most end up in unmarked graves with no funerals and nobody to pay their respects.
Elissa Davey was home watching television when she heard a case like this. She watched a news story about a deceased infant abandoned at a college. She wanted to do something. She got on the phone and called the coroner’s office. “Show me you have a dignified place to put him.”
Since that day in 1998, she has started “The Garden of Innocence” which helps provide funerals, and dignified places of burial for children that everybody else forgot. It’s not easy but she knew she had to do it. She says, “A lot of people ask us how we can bury babies. ‘It’s so hard.’ Our answer is: ‘How can we not?'”